This Is Not Here

9-27 October 1971  

Everson Museum of Art
Syracuse, NY

John Lennon - Guest Artist

Below and to the right there are photos of the This Is Not Here catalogue/poster. 
The catalogue is formatted to look like a gigantic newspaper. It measures 16 1/2" x 21 1/2" and contains 12 pages full of drawings/articles/photos. 
The back cover is the same as the poster for the show (pictured at the top of this page).

Some of the pieces exhibited in the exhibition were: 

AMAZE 
Add Colour Painting 
Sky Machine 
Water Event 
back to top

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Syracuse Museum Is Still Breaking New Ground, by William Kates
from The Buffalo News, 15 October 1997

It was a cold, rainy October evening in 1971 and nearly 8,000 people were camped around the Everson Art Museum.
The museum had gone out on a limb and turned over its entire building to aspiring artist Yoko Ono, then more famous as the woman who broke up the Beatles. Her conceptual works were experimental even for the progressive Everson, and museum officials weren't sure what to expect.
In one room, a large wall contained hundreds of small doors leading to empty boxes. It was titled "Portrait of John Lennon as a Young Cloud."
In another room, "Water Event Artists, " highlighted dozens of objects, all filled with water and sent to Ono by friends."
The next day, a record 4,000 people pushed through the doors for the opening of Ono's exhibit. The others were content to wait outside, hoping for a glimpse of Ono, John Lennon or any of the famous personalities in attendance.
"If it was hot, we did it back then," said retired Everson director Jim Harithas, who booked Ono for her first major museum exhibit.
"We were going way beyond the traditional role of a museum as merely a repository," Harithas said. "We wanted to be original. Very often we were the first. We were cutting edge. It seems like it's been quiet since those days."
The Everson turns 100 years old this year and for its second century, current director Sandra Trop has made it her mission to return to that sense of daring.
"We intend to take risks," she said. "In the future, when people in major cities talk about what's new in the art world, they'll talk about the Everson again."
The museum's birth was a humble one.
It started as little more than a collection of paintings hanging downstairs in a building that served as home for the May Memorial Unitarian Universalist Society.
At the insistence of George Fisk Comfort, the state Board of Regents granted a charter to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1897, prescribing its mission as "the cultivation of the fine arts and the promotion of their practical application."
Comfort was dean of Syracuse University's School of Fine Arts--the first school in the country to offer an art degree--and one of the founders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
It would not be until 1968--after being sheltered in a bank, a library and a Knights of Columbus building--that the museum would have its own dedicated building, financed in part by a $1 million bequest made in 1941 by Helen Everson, heiress to her father's hardware and real estate fortunes.
Everson's generosity set off a 20-year legal brawl between the city, Syracuse University and her family over use of the money.
After the legal wrangling ended, museum officials turned to a budding architect to design their new home.
I.M. Pei responded with an artistic masterpiece.
"The work was very much inspired by the art movement of that particular time. I treated that project as much as a work of sculpture as a work of architecture," said Pei, who has since become prominent worldwide for his work on the Louvre in Paris, the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, and the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston.
The landmark structure--which Pei said remains one of his favorites--was hailed as "the perfect museum." It was, all at once, majestic and understated, daring and subtle, simple and complex.
With Harithas' arrival from the Corcoran Art Gallery in 1971, the Everson entered golden times. His vision was to make the museum a mecca for avant-garde and experimental art forms.
By that time, the Everson already boasted a universally acclaimed collection of American ceramics, including 31 original porcelain works by Adelaide Alsop Robineau, one of America's finest ceramists.
Among those who had shows at the Everson during Harithas' three-year tenure were Yoko Ono, Norman Bluhm, Joan Mitchell, Charlotte Moorman and pioneering video artist Nam June Paik.
"Unlike most museums content to merely survive, the Everson took risks," said former curator David Ross, now director of the Whitney Art Museum in New York City.

Copyright Buffalo News Oct 15, 1997